Hmmm. I love the old Cary Grant movie The Bishop's Wife, with David Niven and Loretta Young.
That movie they made out of the book Polar Express is very interesting and well made, though far more elaborate than the brief story from the original book.
If I can ever find filmed productions of The Nutcracker, I'm happy.
And I am rather partial to the first Santa Clause. My favorite quote: "We're your worst nightmare: elves with attitude."

Special mention goes to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the recent Disney/Walden one. I am a huge Narnia fan and always will be.

I loved Elf and Four Christmases was also quite enjoyable for its different take on Christmas. I've never watched New Year's Eve but I did enjoy its Valentine's Day counterpoints on a pure entertainment level (with no consideration to plot) and so I think I would love New Year's Eve as well if not just to watch the cast interact with each other.

I also tend to like Christmas episodes of my favourite TV shows...if that counts

Do you have the Hallmark channel? It plays almost non stop Christmas shows all season. Last year I watched many of them.

This year, I am finding they repeat them, though, which is lame of me since I am quite happy to watch the original Miracle on 34th Street, A Christmas Story, Charlie Brown Christmas, and the Grinch as many times as they play them.

Your mom sounds like a woman after my own heart. It took my buddies years to persuade me that a DVD player would be a good thing to have. DVR is not within my skill set yet, either.

This morning the Turner movie channel screened the Katharine Hepburn Little Women, which reminds me that any of the three main Little Women productions can be thought of as Christmas movies, and not just because the films all start with a Christmas sequence. I like all three versions for different reasons. Hepburn shines as Jo, of course, in the earliest one, and the other three sisters are well done, and the inimitable Edna May Oliver is Aunt March. (She played many other meaty dowager roles, including Miss Betsy Trotwood in the golden-age David Copperfield, and Miss Pross in A Tale of Two Cities.) The Laurie is a bit unmemorable for me. The later MGM one, with June Allyson, has been eclipsed by the first one, because who could compete with Katharine Hepburn? But it's surprisingly good, and it does an inspired switcheroo by making Amy older than Beth so they can take advantage of one of the greatest child actresses ever, Margaret O'Brien, as the doomed Beth and have Elizabeth Taylor as Amy. Then the most modern one, with Winona Ryder, is probably the lushest in terms of setting and music score (Thomas Newman), and it has hands-down the best Professor Bhaer...Gabriel Byrne. You can absolutely believe why he becomes so important in the life of the Marches. This film was made with great affection for a very low budget (that was used with tremendous efficiency to create lovely settings), and it was cast with almost uncanny prescience for spotting significant talent: Claire Danes and Kirsten Dunst played two of the girls, and Christian Bale played Laurie. Susan Sarandon is convincingly young enough to have kids that young and strong enough to be virtually a single parent while Rev. March is away. A great Christmas movie that I think people of any age can enjoy.

It's a lovely one. I came to it late--in fact I think first I saw it all the way through just within the last year or two. I was charmed and moved by it. I think I read somewhere that June Allyson was so undone by the filming of Margaret O'Brien's death scene that as she was driving home afterward, she had to pull the car over so she could cry. O'Brien was thirteen or fourteen at the time.

One interesting choice that the Winona Ryder version made was to cast two actresses as Amy. That way, she was played by a real twelve-year-old or so at the beginning and then a young woman later on. The other versions couldn't show Amy aging appreciably because she was played by an adult actress throughout. The MGM (Allyson) version, by flipping the ages of Amy and Beth, solved the problem by having the youngest one be the sister who died, so that she didn't have to be shown as an adult. It was a really perfect choice, I think. I wonder whether any bookworm purists complained at the time.

I have just obtained that version! The one with Rosalind Ehle and Colin Firth? I can't wait to watch it. I've seen the Keira Knightley version, which is good, and of course the Laurence Olivier/Greer Garson one, from about 1940, which is splendid. Olivier as a young man was drop-dead gorgeous and had a great ear for romantic comedy.